BESPOKEN (ii)

A new year and new projects to dabble in and this my second post to support this particular project… why? because they invite you to join in and so I have and here, below, is my response to a prompt they published on their site, a post supplied by Sarah Salway.

Oh, and if you are interested in helping a bunch of creative people get this project off the ground, why not pop along and see what they are offering. It's here if you want to look - they need more backers and they need them now:

http://www.zequs.com/campaign/bespoken#.Utgd-v1tcy4

The prompt from Sarah Salway was to write about an item of clothing that was sometimes worn to bring luck. Although my response doesn't quite do that, I kind of like where it took me. See what you think.

OUR DAD’S BESPOKE TAILORED COAT

Our dad’s last and best coat hangs on a swan-neck brass hook behind the front door of my flat. It’s as if he might be visiting and in a room somewhere, quiet and still. It is a smart bespoke tailored coat made by Nathan Lehrman.

‘In this coat you will be made a prince or a king,’ Nat said. ‘And men who do not know you will call you ‘sir’ and women will turn their heads in the streets.’

Our mam said that was fine so long as it did not turn our dad’s head.

We were not ever flush. Our dad got his shirts from the Sunday market where you could get a bargain if you bought two or three at a time. And his suits – the two that he owned, one for work and one for weddings and funerals – were picked from a rack. So, a bespoke coat was something special. It was a gift for a kindness our dad had done the tailor’s family and it cost our dad not a single shiny penny.

Our dad was always doing that, small and bigger good deeds, and he never made a big fuss about what he did and he never took payment neither. Except, one day he got a special coat from Nathan Lehrman and his brother.

I kept the coat after our dad passed away. It still smelled of him then, old spice and cigarettes. And it held the shape of him caught in the wool. I wear it sometimes, to give me strength on hard days, just in the flat. It’s too big for me really and almost touches the toes of my shoes. It’s like being hugged by our dad. And I put my hands in the deep pockets, fingering the small treasures hidden there – glassy smooth pebbles, and shells with rough cut spirals, and bus tickets worn as soft as cloth, and loose change and paperclips and a half empty box of Bluebell matches that rattles.

Now the coat hangs on a hook and, like I said, it’s as though he is visiting, our dad, and as though I could walk into a room and find him there sitting upright and still and kingly.

BESPOKEN (i)

A new year and new projects to dabble in.

I win competitions sometimes, with my stories, and when I do I think I should do something good with the money and sometimes I give some away to charitable causes. I saw an idea recently, online, and it was asking to be supported, financially, so I thought 'why not?' And I did. It's a project about writing and tailoring and it's called BESPOKEN. It's here if you want to look - they need more backers:

http://www.zequs.com/campaign/bespoken#.Utgd-v1tcy4

And they sent me by return a prompt to get me writing and I wrote a poem straight off - and I don't usually do poems, don't never, and it might not be much good, but here it is all the same.

FRAYED AT THE EDGES

Fury's tempered cold steel blade

cuts and cuts,

makes sharp and neat

an incision,

cloth spoiled,

fingered and fretted,

threads pulled

till everything unravels;

a soft jagged edge

feathered and frayed,

strands unpicked,

a scruffy lip-torn labial gape

and threads broken,

cloth un-clothed

pattern unpatterned

leaving an unsuitable suit
and a wedding unwedded.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL THOSE VISITORS WHO COME HERE WEARING SLIPPERS AND MAKING NO SOUND

NOT JUST ANOTHER YEAR, SURELY.

It is that time of year when he thinks he must take stock, looking back at what has been and looking forward to what will be. He scratches his head and sighs – not for any other reason than he is tired, having slept later than usual. The day, if it had been bright, is already tipped over into grey and he sits under a yellow light writing things down in a small black book.

He makes a list of all the good and all of the bad things in the year, as if he is searching for some balance, like an accountant who must make the figures add up and at the end of the year be in the black. A son graduated art college in the summer and that was a bright starry moment and a moment of some pride; then at the end of summer another son was sick and spent time in hospital and the doctors wore serious faces and he thought ‘not again’ and though he is not religious he found himself praying.

And wasn’t there something important in the Easter break? He’d walked from one side of the country to the other in five days. His feet had blistered so badly that he’d limped the last miles but he’d dropped a stone carried from the west coast into the water on the east, and that felt like something.

Things at work changed this year under the banner of ‘more for less’. He thought he should feel lucky for he still had a job, but his head aches sometimes from all that ‘more’ he has to do and he has ‘less’ space in his thinking for the things that matter most to him.

He kept up with the writing and there were some sunny successes, but he feels a little lost there sometimes. He’s reading something by John Berger and something about art that is for its own sake rather than for fame or for money, and he thinks he recognizes something in that. And he thinks about making connections and trying to understand who he is and what his life amounts to, and his writing helps there.  

And he read ‘Independent People’ again and was confirmed in his belief that it is the greatest novel he has ever read and he wants to give the book to everyone he knows and even to people he does not know. And he cried through the last twenty minutes of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ last night, even though he knows that it is sentimental hogwash and James Stewart is pretty enough to never need to act, which is just as well. And he saw ‘Frances Ha,’ and ‘Nebraska’ and ‘The Artist and the Model’ and they were this year’s films and they were all shot in black and white and he wonders if his liking them was for that reason.

Looking forward, he thinks he needs resolutions, something to shake up his life a little, but he isn’t sure what they should be. He’s not shaving at the moment, but that just makes his skin itch and he hasn’t the patience to stick with that; he’s putting money by in a jar, but he’s not sure for what, yet - for a rainy day, he might once have said, but now he thinks he is putting his money away for a sunny day. He wants to paint in bright colours, and to write happy, and to take risks. But mostly he wants to laugh, and he thinks this year he just might do all of those things.